Communication matters.

Many years ago, a company I worked for was going through yet another in what seemed like an endless string of "downsizings." The acronym BOHICA was in active use by a jaded workforce.

Back then, our corporate comms team got very good at communicating job losses because we had lots of practice. When the latest round of cuts would come out of HR (which was nicknamed Human Remains) we would produce a printed communication detailing the organizational changes and documenting the staff reductions, and face-to-face meetings with affected groups would be organized. At those meetings company leaders would do a presentation about why the cuts were necessary, what was happening and where the business was going. Then they would take some time to answer employee questions.

At one such meeting, which I happened to attend, the CFO was asked a pointed question by an understandably grouchy employee.

"When will this company start putting people ahead of profits?" he said, with a kind of grim desperation in his quavering, angry voice.

You could have heard a bean drop as the CFO paused before his reply.

"Never," he said.

His needlessly blunt point, of course, was that if the company were to take its eye off the bottom line and give something like preserving jobs a higher priority, there would be no profits...which would mean there would be no money to pay salaries...which would mean that, before long, there would be no people left to put ahead of anything.

Although there's an appealing simplicity to it, we all know that this old-school, one-dimensional business imperative is flawed, and putting profit above all else is not the way to build a healthy, sustainable company. Recent events in the global financial industry remind us that too sharp a focus on profits -- especially short-term profits -- can be bad for business, and for society.

The circumstances related to the current downturn are new, but the massive job losses and severe corporate austerity programs that accompany each trough in the economic cycle are not new at all -- nor is the need to communicate with beleaguered employees.

It's ironic that when times are toughest, our role as communicators is most valued and we experience some of the most meaningful and fulfilling times in our careers.

Fulfilling, sometimes even exciting, but often not very much fun. One of the hardest things I've found about communicating at times like this is the big disconnect between the negative impact of job cuts on employees and the positive effect they have on a company's share price. We spend so much time and effort preparing to give employees the bad news with all the sensitivity and respect they deserve. The same information, packaged in a media release, invariably ends up being excellent news to the market, which rewards the ugly short-term actions with a proportionately beautiful spike in the share price.

Some of us have been around long enough to know that the short term gain of downsizing is often followed by long-term suffering, especially when it is accompanied by poor leadership. The lack of trust, bad morale, high turnaround, low engagement and poor attitude to customers that characterize todays' workplace can be traced back to the short-sighted brutality of the downsizings and reorganizations that have ravaged much of the corporate world over the past 20 years.

This is not to say the impact of that brutality goes unnoticed when it occurs. As one of my favorite bloggers, Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross, pointed out in a recent post, the elimination of 40,000 jobs at AT&T in 1996 led to an huge and instant increase in the company's market capitalization, but it also sparked widespread public fury and even prompted the U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich to leap onto the dogpile:

“Does a company have obligations and responsibilities beyond the bottom line? Does a company owe anything to its workers, its workers’ families, the communities in which it does business? Managers who balk at executing the judgments of the market may fear with some reason that they will quickly face their own day of reckoning. And yet, I want to suggest to you that this restricted vision of stewardship may be ultimately disastrous for this country. And it may ultimately harm American business.”

Prophetic words, and we're all living with the outcome today.

The big question is, will the current crisis be resolved in a way that will lead to permanent and positive changes in the way leaders lead and companies operate? Will our society find a way to return some balance and humanity to the business imperative?

I believe these changing times will change business for good. And business communicators have an opportunity to play a strategic role as we go through this once-in-a-lifetime paradigm shift.

I've had a chance to reflect on my recent speaking (and cooking) engagements in Houston and Toronto and thought I'd share some of my observations with FYA readers:

IABC members are kind, hospitable, intelligent folks who treat me like a member of their family wherever I go. Which was particularly satisfying in Houston, considering that I staged an unusual barbecue demonstration for a group of TEXANS. Yikes! I'm lucky I made it out of there with my tongs intact. (See the photos here and the local coverage here.)

Everybody in our profession is thinking and talking about the exciting and anxiety-inducing world of social media -- and lots are also diving in, too. A show of hands revealed that at least 80 or 90 per cent of the big crowd who turned up to see my IABC Toronto talk are twittering. Which is a good sign, even if twitter may not turn out to be The Next Big Thing, because ...

Exactly NONE of the 40 or so very smart HR people I talked to the next morning at a Conference Board of Canada HR conference are trading tweets. That spells opportunity for the more Web 2.0-savvy communicators, who can use their hands-on experience to help bring their HR colleagues and senior executives on board.

Or maybe the IABC group's twitter mania is an indication of just how desperate employee communicators are to get on the latest technological bandwagon so they can escape their nightmarish day-to-day existence maintaining outdated, clunky intranets and dealing with skittish, change-averse leaders who drive them crazy with their old-school ideas. Just kidding!

Which brings me to a final anecdote. It's from the last day of my Toronto trip, at a half-day in-house workshop I delivered to the communications team of a big insurance company. Thisstinging observation came from the intranet manager: "The kids coming into our workplace today can do more on their cell phones than on our intranet." That statement alone should be a wake-up call for communicators and business leaders everywhere.

[Special thanks to my many generous hosts, and to Toronto's William Smith and Houston's Chris Salvo for the great photos!]

Recently I delivered a webinar to members of the British Columbia Human Resources Management Association about the implications of social media for HR professionals. To complement my presentation I was invited to write an article for the BCHRMA's online newsletter. I thought it would be worth sharing with For Your Approval readers, and I invite you to pass on a link to this post to your friends in HR in hopes it might start a conversation about internal use of Web 2.0 tools. You'll notice the article applies equally well to employee communications people. Have a read and let me know what you think.(I'm also delivering a similar message to a Conference Board of Canada HR conference in Toronto next month. If you know anyone who's planning to attend, as a speaker I can get up to three people a big discount. )

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Is It Time For HR to Make Friends with Social Media?

Ron Shewchuk, ABC, MC

Are you keeping in touch with your friends on Facebook or sharing photos on Flikr? Do you read blogs, or listen to audio or video podcasts? Have you found yourself regularly turning to Wikipedia to get information? And do you like to find out what other people on the Web are saying about a restaurant or a vacation resort before you visit?

If you live in this new online world, you are among the majority. Hundreds of millions of people are actively using these so-called social media on a newly re-energized Internet that’s been dubbed Web 2.0.

According to a March 2008 study by Universal McCann, close to 60 per cent of active Internet users have created a profile on a social network like Facebook or Myspace, about 80 per cent read blogs and watch video clips online, and nearly half have downloaded a podcast onto their computer or personal music player.

More than a passing fad

This broad adoption of social media tools is more than a passing fad – it’s a social trend that is profoundly changing the way people find and share information. It’s also creating powerful online communities that can stage activist campaigns, lead consumer revolts and even influence the outcome of elections, as we saw with Barack Obama’s use of Facebook and other social media to build grassroots support and solicit donations.

As the use of social media gains popularity with the general public, the corporate world is taking notice. Although the adoption rate for business lags the general internet-going public, social media are being used successfully by many leading companies. Today over 67 of Fortune 500 companies have official blogs ranging from corporate CEO journals like Bill Marriott’s On the Move blog, which gives the hotel chain’s leader a direct connection to the public, to Clorox’s Dr. Laundry blog, where visitors can ask questions about how to remove tough stains.

Lots of internal uses, too

When used internally, Web 2.0 tools can help improve productivity, encourage innovation, and drive employee engagement and retention.

Examples abound, from simple internal blogs that give CEOs a direct connection to more innovative applications. Computer maker Dell, for example, has an intranet page that invites employees to submit ideas for product and service improvements and lets readers promote and discuss them. It’s a powerful tool; the ideas that rise to the top are getting implemented.

The level of sophistication is rising as companies learn how to use the new tools and some organizations are now taking a multi-channel, integrated approach. Ernst & Young, for example, has a Facebook page, Twitter feed and YouTube channel that work together to support the firm’s global recruiting efforts. E&Y even has an online social network on Linkedin for its alumni with over 9,000 members. Imagine being able to draw on such a large repository of institutional memory!

A new role for HR

So, what does this all mean for HR professionals? For starters, it means asking some timely questions: What is the business case for using these new tools? Do the opportunities outweigh the risks? What guidelines and policies should be set out for their use? How much freedom should employees have to join, participate in and create external social networks for business?

The answers to these questions have big implications. Successfully implementing the new tools and technologies will require new ways of thinking about the role of the human resources function in today’s organization. Traditionally, HR has been the keeper and careful disseminator of information, but business communication is now moving inexorably to a model where the users – employees, in this case – will have the power to create their own content, customize information according to their needs, and build their own internal networks and online communities. So, in addition to HR’s job of creating, communicating and administering policy, a new and additional role is emerging: that of a facilitator of conversations.

We’ve reached a tipping point

Internal use of social media is certainly gaining momentum. A survey of North American business professionals in 2008 by software provider Awareness Inc. concluded that adoption of Web 2.0 technologies “has reached a tipping point,” reporting that 69 per cent of respondents allow social networking for business purposes -- a dramatic increase from 37 per cent in 2007. The same survey found that close to half of companies have either launched or are testing internal blogs, social networks and podcasts.

And yet, with the corporate world on the edge of broad implementation of social media, there is still a lot of reluctance. Employers fear that use of social media at work will damage productivity and compromise security. Plus, in this economic environment, is it really worth spending money to deploy fancy new technology in a cash-strapped workplace?

These are valid concerns. The good news is that the early adopters of social media have made the mistakes that beginners make, and by now they have worked out many of the kinks and cleared the path for the rest of us. Issues of productivity and security can be addressed with clear policies that set the right groundwork for success, coupled with well-planned and disciplined implementation of social media. And the cost of using these new online tools is low; the software is often free of charge.

I was reminded the other day of the importance of the words "no" and "yes" in internal communications, and the even greater importance of knowing how, and when, to say them.

Here are some nos I'd like the hear more often:

No, we can't include that 200-word sentence in the story because it doesn't make sense.No, we shouldn't keep that critical fact from employees because they already know it.No, we'd better not paint too positive a picture because employees can smell bullshit a mile away.No, the company shouldn't impose that new policy without consulting with employees.No, I won't put a picture of your damned cat in the employee newsletter.

And so on. You gotta draw the line. The problem is, the more we say no, the more managers think employee communicators are not much more than bureaucratic obstacles to communicating. We're often seen to have these weird highfalutin standards that show we don't understand the business or the true culture of the organization.

And so, to avoid being viewed as stonewalling bureaucrats, we get in the habit of saying yes to things we shouldn't, like,

Yes, I'll publish that insanely cold, jargony, meaningless message to employees.Yes, it's just fine that you didn't consult me before you made that stupid, morale-destroying decision.Yes, I'll do exactly what you tell me, and I really don't mind being told what to do.Yes, we don't have to do any meaningful follow-up on those lousy employee survey results.Yes, it's just fine to eliminate our flagship print publication.

You get the idea.

Of course, there are effective ways to say no that don't include the word no and don't necessarily make a bad impression. In the end, the key to being an effective communicator isn't whether you say yes or no, but rather whether you approach your job with integrity -- and whether you help solve an organization's problems in a way that earns you trust, confidence and respect.

Yet another study from a big HR consulting firm came out this week. This one, from Watson Wyatt, demonstrates unequivocally that employee communications matter -- that doing it right is a measurable competitive advantage. The firm's annual Communication ROI Study outlines the six communication "secrets" of top employers in the U.S. (My favorite "secret": "Leveraging the talents of internal communicators to manage change effectively.")

As self-serving as these studies are, I think they're great. Each one seems to hone in a little closer on a fundamental truth in business today: that connecting with employees is worth the trouble.

As I have said in this space before: well, duh. And yet. And yet so many organizations are losing the battle as they struggle to improve their broken relationships with their people. Part of the answer (as the self-serving news releases from the big consulting firms would like us to believe) is for companies to open up their pocketbooks and hire the good folks at WW and TP to develop and help implement big internal engagement programs. Part of it is for CEOs to wake up and take a hard look at whether they're paying enough attention to this critical part of their leadership responsibilities.

And part of the answer is in the hands of internal communicators. We need to stand up on our chairs and speak up about what really matters to us and to the organizations we serve. And, as we're wobbling and clearing our throat, having those self-serving studies in our back pocket ain't a bad thing.

I got a question in my e-mail the other day from a fellow IABC member who works in employee communications at a big national untility. She had recently received a request from HR to list
employee retirements in the company magazine. The magazine doesn't publish birthdays or service anniversaries either.

"We're focused on retaining our current employees," she wrote. "Why celebrate those who are leaving the company?"

I told her she should list the retirements in the employee publication.

Not listing birthdays, I can see. But I’m not sure why companies don’t publish retirements and service anniversaries. These are important milestones in an employee’s career, It’s a good thing to let others know about them, even if all it does is prompt a few people to send congratulatory e-mails or pick up the phone and make a brief, positive connection.

Service anniversaries and retirements are important information if you want to create some sense of community and pride in your organization. How much room do they take up anyway? If you do a basic listing at the back of the publication, even with small photos, we’re not talking about a lot of space. If some people don’t want to read it, they can turn the page. But for the people named, and their colleagues, this kind of attention can mean a lot.

I once worked for a company
that did not publish the names of retiring or departing employees during a large downsizing. Those who
remained were disappointed that departures
weren’t listed somewhere -- just so they could know who had left. It would have helped provide some closure during a
stressful and uncertain time.

A lively conversation I started a couple of weeks ago continues on Shel Holtz's blog, a shel of my former self. The defining quote, from Shel:

"Wherever your internal communications department sits in the org chart ... you’d better make sure there’s a strong tie to the external
team and that messages are clear, consistent, accurate, thorough and
candid. If not, this new era of social computing could reach up and
bite your company in the ass."

It's an age-old question: what box should employee communications occupy in the standard corporate org chart?

There are lots of options. Over my career I have seen internal communications report through to HR, public affairs, legal, administration and even marketing.

In an ideal world, employee communications would have its own VP, reporting directly to the CEO. The VP of Employee Communications (got a nice ring to it, don't it?) would counsel the CEO and the senior exectutive team on internal communications strategy and would use every internal channel to help build an integrated, fully engaged, high-performance workforce. Employee communication issues would be would be taken into account before any decision or action the organization would take.

The EC VP would have a seat at the strategic table, where he or she would champion the core values of accuracy, transparency, timeliness and humanity. Thanks to the leadership and wise counsel of the EC VP, the CEO and executives would communicate effectively and earn the trust of employees, who would become so connected to the business and so committed to its vision that the competition would have no chance. Eventually, the EC VP would rise to become CEO, and over time MBA grads would covet the EC VP position as a surefire path to corporate glory.

As Nelson on The Simpsons would say, "Ha-ha!" Never in a thousand years. Our function will always report to someone else, whose duties will include employee communications, among other things. We are perennially undervalued function. Executives all think of themselves as communicators (what else is sound management but good communication?). Therefore, appointing someone to be responsible for employee communications at the executive level would be the ultimate abdication of authority and a tacit admission of incompetence on the part of the rest of the executive team.

So, in the absence of the impossible EC VP dream, to whom should we report -- in an ideal, but realistic, world?

How about HR? Human Resources is, after all, responsible for the company's relationship with its employees -- hiring, firing, providing benefits, doling out pensions, awarding pins and watches for long service, negotiating with unions, training...doesn't it make perfect sense to have employee communications reporting to this function?

The only problem is that most, if not all, human resources activities are related to maintaining privacy and secrecy. "We can't divulge this." "We don't want to be tipping our hand in the middle of contract talks." "That's a very sensitive issue that's under discussion and we can't talk about it until it's resolved." "If employees knew that, they'd all want it and we'd go broke." And so on. Also, HR execs, because they have so many tactical responsibilities, tend to focus on tactics and don't think strategically about employee communications, or anything else for that matter. There's just too damned much to do just to keep things running properly.

And how about legal? Lots of communications functions report up to the chief legal officer or corporate counsel. But it's the same problem of secrecy. Lawyers are in the business of reducing risk and limiting liability, which are activities that often don't entail open, transparent communication. "We only communicate when we have to, and only in a way that minimizes the legal risk."

And then there's corporate communications, or public affairs. Lots of employee communicators these days report to someone who is responsible for external communications. That's better, perhaps, because the PR type has got to care about open communications. And they'll have at least a basic knowledge of employee communications theories and practices.

But the problem is that executives who are primarily responsible for external communications tend to live in a world where they go from one external crisis to the next. They are constantly distracted by the very important public issues that their organization faces, and therefore they don't pay a lot of attention to strategic employee communications.

They think that as long as there's someone competent doing the employee newsletter/intranet site, and the department knows how to organize one or two face-to-face meetings with the CEO every year, they're covered. Of course, if there's a strike, then it becomes a public issue, and then they'll pay full attention -- at least until the story is out of the headlines.

What's worse, external communications people tend to not get along with HR and legal types because of the clash in values described above, so employee communicators who report to external communicators often tend to have negative, adversarial relationships with HR and legal, which doesn't do anybody any good. In other words, if your report directly to HR, you'll have to learn to work with them. If you don't have a direct reporting line to them, it will be easy to ignore or demonize them.

But, of course, I'm generalizing. One thing is for sure. Whatever function we report to, a lot depends on the culture of the organization and the particular person we're reporting to. Some legal and HR execs really do understand the importance of open communiciation with employees, and they're a dream to work with. And some companies have such a healthy, open work environment that it doesn't matter what the reporting structure is -- the employee communicator has a voice that will be listened to, and heeded.

And, of course, a lot depends on you, the communicator. If you have the right values, and you know how to build positive relationships, and you can passionately sell an idea or argue a case, you're going to be successful no matter who you report to.

So, what to do? What works?

If y ou were organizing or reorganizing your company today, where would employee communications fit in? Has anyone done definitive research on this topic? Does anyone have any strong opinions? Is the answer more obvious than I think it is?